Garden - Spring 2023

Front flower bed when purple irises bloom

Anybody want a nice, light break to see what’s coming alive in the garden? Yeah, me too.

Earlier I mentioned that our front flowerbed has something in bloom almost constantly from when the crocuses appear in February until the end of the growing season in about September or October. Right now is its most glorious time of year, dominated by purple irises.

Reflected in our bay window, you can glimpse a wildflower patch across the street that gardening neighbor Sue persuaded the local Council to allow on a small piece of public land by the roadside. You can’t see what’s on the other side of the hedge. The people who bought that small farm have planted an orchard there. It’s a large part of the view from my home office. In a few years it will be glorious.

Front garden including dwarf mini-orchard

Speaking of trees, our mini-orchard of dwarf fruit trees has only been in our front garden for just under a year. All five trees seem happy. The red Falstaff apple covered itself in blossoms, which I was a few days too late to capture in a photo. It’s the tree closest to the camera. We have two varieties of apple, two of pear and one golden gage (a type of plum).

Behind the trees is a redcurrant bush as tall as the trees. Sue asked my wife V if she would like to have one that Sue was removing from her garden. V thought she meant a modest meter-high plant. The next thing we knew, we had three, each five to six feet tall. One was just a tiny root and branch. One was so heavy I could scarcely pick it up. You can see the medium-sized one that we kept. The others went to a friend’s smallholding in Wales, where they are now part of an edible hedge.

The blueberries in front of the fence look like they don’t intend to fruit as heavily as they did last year. They seem healthy, just in a mood to take it easy this year. The two hydrangeas are striving to recover from damage inflicted by a late frost.

Over the next couple of weeks, the front lawn will become ragged and tall. When the wildflowers in it begin to flower, I stop mowing until those flowers are past their peak. For two or three years a strip along the neighboring driveway stayed unmowed until the end of the season. Sue noticed a couple of wild orchids there. They used to be common but are rare now, and they don’t tolerate being transplanted. We left the strip wild for them. They have given up. We can’t find any sign of them this spring.

Garden along high retaining wall

V does most of the gardening in this view.

Gardens are never finished. Our latest addition is a new trellis on the remaining large bare section of the highest retaining wall. The entire wall gets such good sunlight, we want to take advantage. The wall absorbs heat all afternoon and then releases it through the night. Plants love it.

The stone circles are too close to the wall for plants to be put in the ground there. To find a solution, we went to the big garden center that provided trees for our mini-orchard. They grow their own stock and supply other garden centers. V thought she wanted a clematis at this trellis, but the garden center staff said it would outgrow even a huge pot too quickly. They recommended a specific member of the jasmine family instead, so that’s what is in the blue pot. They say it will take over the trellis, bloom four months of the year and stay green through the winter instead of becoming bare. It will also be content in a pot that size for several years. We look forward to seeing how it looks a couple of years from now.

The dwarf cherry tree seems better than last year, when an infestation made it drop all its fruit long before anything had a chance to ripen. We have plum tomato plants established in the main greenhouse planter, a couple of cucumber plants in pots, herbs in balcony boxes there… but no more of my seedlings are sprouting there. I moved them to an indoor windowsill. Something in the greenhouse likes to eat my seedlings as soon as they are half an inch tall. Plants need to be bigger before they go there.

The veggie patch has runner beans, sweet peas, chives, spring onions, lemon balm, mint, and will get a few more plants in the next few days.

Balcony boxes of radishes, chard, strawberry spinach and lettuce (right to left)

Balcony boxes and the new strawberry planter are my domain. Remember, our philosophy is that we should nurture whatever grows well for us regardless of whether we especially like it, then swap any extra produce with friends.

Of all the edibles in our balcony boxes, I am least keen about eating radishes. They have simply never appealed much to me. What does best in the balcony boxes? What has been first to become a harvest? Radishes, of course.

You can see them in the balcony box at the far right. After taking this photo, I harvested and pickled most of them. It isn’t the type of pickling for preservation. It’s for taste as a garnish on some of the Asian meals we eat. We tried them last night with a broth of miso, tofu, mushrooms, spring onions and noodles. They were good that way. I’ll harvest the last few and replant the balcony box.

The chard in this picture overwintered from last year and is bolting. It will be replaced soon by newly planted chard. Next is strawberry spinach, an American plant I’m curious about. Supposedly we can eat leaves as salad greens and the red fruit it makes after it bolts is edible too. Last in the picture is head lettuce which desperately needs to be thinned.

Lower back garden

Did I mention that gardens are never finished?

You are looking at the site of our primary garden project for this spring. Well, the next project aside from putting up one more trellis for the clematis V still very much wants.

This is the lower portion of our back garden. We intended to put a shed where you now see an odd patch of grass between the house and a square of slate chips. Doing that hasn’t felt right. Leaving it this way isn’t right either. That odd patch of grass is always in the shade and it’s mushy almost all the time. Only the worst droughts ever make it nicely walkable.

There used to be a square of paving slabs where the slate chips are now, with a table and chairs. It caught full sun on summer afternoons. As the first step in the gabion wall project, we repurposed those slabs to widen the patio during lockdown when we couldn’t get anything or go anywhere.

V misses having a seating area there.

After much back and forth, here’s the plan:

• Re-establish a paving slab square in the middle of what now has slate chips.

• Get rid of the landscape timber so the slate chip square is bounded by the same thin type of board on that side.

• Build a picket fence along the line currently set by the landscape timber to keep the dogs off that portion of the garden. (They don’t include it in their play sessions anyway. The slate chips are too uncomfortable for running and sudden turns, and the grass is too mushy.) Install a gate leading into the slate chip and paving slab area.

• Turn the mushy grass area into another fernery. It won’t quite be a Victorian stumpery. We’ll have some interesting fallen branches instead of upended tree stumps. But the effect of ferns, brunnera and other moisture-loving, shade-loving plants with some deadfall among them should be like what we see on a walk in the woods.

• Put some comfy patio furniture on the paving slabs for lounging in summer afternoon sunshine.

• Install a cat flap as a hedgehog door through the front fence into the new fernery. (Although someone ran over the hedgehog we hoped to invite as a guest, Sue has noticed hedgehog scat in her garden since then. There’s another hedgehog we can invite!)

• Hide the composter behind a screen, perhaps of woven willow branches.

• Move the potato grow bags to someplace along the grey fence above this section of the garden. (I’ve done that.) Maybe move out the strawberry planter and/or the long seating bench too.

• Make something tidy to hold the scrap wood that certain small children play with like building blocks when they visit.

A bundle of wood is due to arrive today for the fence. I’ll have to pick up more supplies in town.

This should keep me off the streets and in trouble for a while.